This article aims at testing whether child labor is caused by poverty. Tests are designed for rural areas in a setting characterized by the absence of a labor market. A model of rural household labor supply is developed that provides testable implications of two different poverty hypotheses. We...

We show that taking into account the consequences of child labor on both childhood welfare and human capital investment, instead of focusing exclusively on the human capital dimension, brings new insights on the economic analysis of child labor. In particular, there are new sources of potential...